De Descriptione Temporum

De Descriptione Temporum

Inaugural Lecture from The Chair of Mediaeval and Renaissance

Literature at Cambridge University, 1954

By C. S. Lewis

SPEAKING FROM a newly founded Chair, I find myself freed from one embarrassment only to fall
into another. I have no great predecessors to overshadow me; on the other hand, I must try (as the
theatrical people say) "to create the part". The responsibility is heavy. If I miscarry, the University
might come to regret not only my election—an error which, at worst, can be left to the great healer~but
even, which matters very much more, the foundation of the Chair itself. That is why I have thought it
best to take the bull by the horns and devote this lecture to explaining as clearly as I can the way in
which I approach my work; my interpretation of the commission you have given me.

What most attracted me in that commission was the combination "Medieval and Renaissance". I
thought that by this formula the University was giving official sanction to a change which has been
coming over historical opinion within my own lifetime. It is temperately summed up by Professor
Seznec in the words: "As the Middle Ages and the Renaissance come to be better known, the
traditional antithesis between them grows less marked." 1 Some scholars might go further than
Professor Seznec, but very few, I believe, would now oppose him. If we are sometimes unconscious of
the change, that is not because we have not shared it but because it has been gradual and
imperceptible. We recognize it most clearly if we are suddenly brought face to face with the old view
in its full vigour. A good experiment is to re-read the first chapter of J. M. Berdan's Early Tudor Poetry. 2
It is still in many ways a useful book; but it is now difficult to read that chapter without a smile. We
begin with twenty -nine pages (and they contain several misstatements) of unrelieved gloom about
grossness, superstition, and cruelty to children, and on the twenty-ninth comes the sentence, "The first
rift in this darkness is the Copernican doctrine"; as if a new hypothesis in astronomy would naturally
make a man stop hitting his daughter about the head. No scholar could now write quite like that. But
the old picture, done in far cruder colours, has survived among the weaker brethren, if not (let us
hope) at Cambridge, yet certainly in that Western darkness from which you have so lately bidden me
emerge. Only last summer a young gentleman whom I had the honour of examining described Thomas
Wyatt as "the first man who scrambled ashore out of the great, dark surging sea of the Middle Ages". 3
This was interesting because it showed how a stereotyped image can obliterate a man's own
experience. Nearly all the medieval texts which the syllabus had required him to study had in reality
led him into formal gardens where every passion was subdued to a ceremonial and every problem of
conduct was dovetailed into a complex and rigid moral theology.

From the formula "Medieval and Renaissance", then, I inferred that the University was encouraging
my own belief that the barrier between those two ages has been greatly exaggerated, if indeed it was
not largely a figment of Humanist propaganda. At the very least, I was ready to welcome any
increased flexibility in our conception of history. All lines of demarcation between what we call
"periods" should be subject to constant revision. Would that we could dispense with them altogether!
As a great Cambridge historian 4 has said: "Unlike dates, periods are not facts. They are retrospective
conceptions that we form about past events, useful to focus discussion, but very often leading
historical thought astray." The actual temporal process, as we meet it in our lives (and we meet it, in a
strict sense, nowhere else) has no divisions, except perhaps those "blessed barriers between day and
day", our sleeps. Change is never complete, and change never ceases. Nothing is ever quite finished

1 J. Seznec, La Survivance des dieux antiques (London, 1940) trans. B. F. Sessions (Kingsport, Tennessee, 1953),
P. 3

2 New York, 1920

3 A delicious passage in Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, trans. E. F. M. Benecke (London, 1895):, p. 241,
contrasts the Middle Ages with "more normal periods of history.

4 G. M. Lrevelyan, English Social History (London, 1944), P. 92.

with; it may always begin over again. (This is one of the sides of life that Richardson hits off with
wearying accuracy.) And nothing is quite new; it was always somehow anticipated or prepared for. A
seamless, formless continuity-in-mutability is the mode of our fife. But unhappily we cannot as
historians dispense with periods. We cannot use for literary history the technique of Mrs. Woolf s The
Waves. We cannot hold together huge masses of particulars without putting into them some kind of
structure. Still less can we arrange a term's work or draw up a lecture list. Thus we are driven back
upon periods. All divisions will falsify our material to some extent; the best one can hope is to choose
those which will falsify it least. But because we must divide, to reduce the emphasis on any one
traditional division must, in the long run, mean an increase of emphasis on some other division. And
that is the subject I want to discuss. If we do not put the Great Divide between the Middle Ages and
the Renaissance, where should we put it? I ask this question with the full consciousness that, in the
reality studied, there is no Great Divide. There is nothing in history that quite corresponds to a
coastline or a watershed in geography. If, in spite of this, I still think my question worth asking, that is
certainly not because I claim for my answer more than a methodological value, or even much of that.
Least of all would I wish it to be any less subject than others to continual attack and speedy revision.
But I believe that the discussion is as good a way as any other of explaining how I look at the work
you have given me. When I have finished it, I shall at least have laid the cards on the table and you
will know the worst.

The meaning of my title will now have become plain. It is a chapter-heading borrowed from Isidore. 5
In that chapter Isidore is engaged in dividing history, as he knew it, into its periods; or, as he calls
them, aetates. I shall be doing the same. Assuming that we do not put our great frontier between the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance, I shall consider the rival claims of certain other divisions which
have been, or might be, made. But, first, a word of warning. I am not, even on the most Lilliputian
scale, emulating Professor Toynbee or Spengler. About everything that could be called "the
philosophy of history" I am a desperate sceptic. I know nothing of the future, not even whether there
will be any future. I don't know whether past history has been necessary or contingent. I don't know
whether the human tragi-comedy is now in Act I or Act V; whether our present disorders are those of
infancy or of old age. I am merely considering how we should arrange or schematize those facts-
ludicrously few in comparison with the totality which survive to us (often by accident) from the past. I
am less like a botanist in a forest than a woman arranging a few cut flowers for the drawing room. So,
in some degree, are the greatest historians. We can't get into the real forest of the past; that is part of
what the word past means.

The first division that naturally occurs to us is that between Antiquity and the Dark Ages-the fall of
the Empire, the barbarian invasions, the christening of Europe. And of course no possible revolution
in historical thought will ever make this anything less than a massive and multiple change. Do not
imagine that I mean to belittle it. Yet I must observe that three things have happened since, say,
Gibbon's time, which make it a shade less catastrophic for us than it was for him.

1. The partial loss of ancient learning and its recovery at the Renaissance were for him both unique
events. History furnished no rivals to such a death and such a re-birth. But we have lived to see the
second death of ancient learning. In our time something which was once the possession of all educated
men has shrunk to being the technical accomplishment of a few specialists. If we say that this is not
total death, it may be replied that there was no total death in the Dark Ages either. It could even be
argued that Latin, surviving as the language of Dark Age culture, and preserving the disciplines of
Law and Rhetoric, gave to some parts of the classical heritage a far more living and integral status in
the life of those ages than the academic studies of the specialists can claim in our own. As for the area
and the tempo of the two deaths, if one were looking for a man who could not read Virgil though his
father could, he might be found more easily in the twentieth century than in the fifth.

2. To Gibbon the literary change from Virgil to Beowulf or the Hildebrand, if he had read them, would
have seemed greater than it can to us. We can now see quite clearly that these barbarian poems were

' Etymologiarum, ed. W. A Lindsay, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1911), V. xxxix.

not really a novelty comparable to, say, The Waste Land or Mr. Jones's Anathemata. They were rather
an unconscious return to the spirit of the earliest classical poetry. The audience of Homer, and the
audience of the Hildebrand, once they had learned one another's language and metre, would have
found one another's poetry perfectly intelligible. Nothing new had come into the world.

3. The christening of Europe seemed to all our ancestors, whether they welcomed it themselves as
Christians, or, like Gibbon, deplored it as humanistic unbelievers, a unique, irreversible event. But we
have seen the opposite process. Of course the un-christening of Europe in our time is not quite
complete; neither was her christening in the Dark Ages. But roughly speaking we may say that
whereas all history was for our ancestors divided into two periods, the pre-Christian and the Christian,
and two only, for us it falls into three-the pre-Christian, the Christian, and what may reasonably be
called the post-Christian. This surely must make a momentous difference. I am not here considering
either the christening or the un-christening from a theological point of view. I am considering them
simply as cultural changes. 6 When I do that, it appears to me that the second change is even more
radical than the first. Christians and Pagans had much more in common with each other than either has
with a post-Christian. The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as that
between those who worship and those who do not. The Pagan and Christian ages alike are ages of
what Pausanias would call the Spcojievov, 7 the externalised and enacted idea; the sacrifice, the games,
the triumph, the ritual drama, the Mass, the tourna- ment, the masque, the pageant, the epithalamium,
and with them ritual and symbolic costumes, trabea and laticlave, crown of wild olive, royal crown,
coronet, judge's robes, knight's spurs, herald's tabard, coat-armour, priestly vestment, religious habit-
for every rank, trade, or occasion its visible sign. But even if we look away from that into the temper
of men's minds, I seem to see the same. Surely the gap between Professor Ryle and Thomas Browne is
far wider than that between Gregory the Great and Virgil e Surely Seneca and Dr. Johnson are closer
together than Burton and Freud?

You see already the lines along which my thought is working; and indeed it is no part of my aim to
save a surprise for the end of the lecture. If I have ventured, a little, to modify our view of the
transition from "the Antique" to "the Dark", it is only because I believe we have since witnessed a
change even more profound.

The next frontier which has been drawn, though not till recently, is that between the Dark and the
Middle Ages. We draw it somewhere about the early twelfth century. This frontier clearly cannot
compete with its predecessor in the religious field; nor can it boast such drastic redistribution of
populations. But it nearly makes up for these deficiencies in other ways. The change from Ancient to
Dark had, after all, consisted mainly in losses. Not entirely. The Dark Ages were not so unfruitful in
progress as we sometimes think. They saw the triumph of the codex or hinged book over the roll or
volumen-a technical improvement almost as important for the history of learning as the invention of
printing. All exact scholarship depends on it. And if-here I speak under correction-they also invented
the stirrup, they did something almost as important for the art of war as the inventor of Tanks. But in
the main, they were a period of retrogression: worse houses, worse drains, fewer baths, worse roads,
less security. (We notice in Beowulfihat an old sword is expected to be better than a new one.) With
the Middle Ages we reach a period of widespread and brilliant improvement. The text of Aristotle is
recovered. Its rapid assimilation by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas opens up a new world of
thought. In architecture new solutions of technical problems lead the way to new aesthetic effects. In
literature the old alliterative and assonantal metres give place to that rhymed and syllabic verse which
was to carry the main burden of European poetry for centuries. At the same time the poets explore a
whole new range of sentiment. I am so far from underrating this particular revolution that I have
before now been accused of exaggerating it. But "great" and "small" are terms of comparison. I would
think this change in literature the greatest if I did not know of a greater, it does not seem to me that the

6 It is not certain that either process, seen (if we could see it) sub specie aeternitatis, would be more important
than it appears to the historian of culture The amount of Christian (that is, of penitent and regenerate) life in an
age, as distinct from "Christian Civilisation", is not to be judged by mortals.

7 De Descriptione Graec. II, xxxvii.

work of the Troubadours and Chrestien and the rest was really as great a novelty as the poetry of the
twentieth century. A man bred on the Chanson de Roland might have been puzzled by the Lancelot. He
would have wondered why the author spent so much time on the sentiments and so (comparatively)
little on the actions. But he would have known that this was what the author had done. He would, in
one important sense, have known what the poem was "about". If he had misunderstood the intention,
he would at least have understood the words. That is why I do not think the change from " Dark" to "
Middle " can, on the literary side, be judged equal to the change which has taken place in my own
lifetime. And of course in religion it does not even begin to compete.

A third possible frontier remains to be considered. We might draw our line somewhere towards the
end of the seventeenth century, with the general acceptance of Copernicanism, the dominance of
Descartes, and (in England) the foundation of the Royal Society. Indeed, if we were considering the
history of thought (in the narrower sense of the word) I believe this is where I would draw my line.
But if we are considering the history of our culture in general, it is a different matter. Certainly the
sciences then began to advance with a firmer and more rapid tread. To that advance nearly all the later,
and (in my mind) vaster, changes can be traced. But the effects were delayed. The sciences long
remained like a lion-cub whose gambols delighted its master in private; it had not yet tasted man's
blood. All through the eighteenth century the tone of the common mind remained ethical, rhetorical,
juristic, rather than scientific, so that Johnson 8 could truly say, "the knowledge of external nature, and
the sciences which that knowledge requires or includes, are not the great or the frequent business of
the human mind." It is easy to see why. Science was not the business of Man because Man had not yet
become the business of science. It dealt chiefly with the inanimate; and it threw off few technological
by-products. When Watt makes his engine, when Darwin starts monkeying with the ancestry of
Man,and Freud with his soul, and the economists with all that is his, then indeed the lion will have got
out of its cage. Its liberated presence in our midst will become one of the most important factors in
everyone's daily life. But not yet; not in the seventeenth century.

It is by these steps that I have come to regard as the greatest of all divisions in the history of the
West that which divides the present from, say, the age of Jane Austen and Scott. The dating of such
things must of course be rather hazy and indefinite. No one could point to a year or a decade in which
the change indisputably began, and it has probably not yet reached its peak. But somewhere between
us and the Waverley Novels, somewhere between us and Persuasion, the chasm runs. Of course, I had
no sooner reached this result than I asked myself whether it might not be an illusion of perspective.
The distance between the telegraph post I am touching and the next telegraph post looks longer than
the sum of the distances between all the other posts. Could this be an illusion of the same sort? We
cannot pace the periods as we could pace the posts. I can only set out the grounds on which, after
frequent reconsideration, I have found myself forced to reaffirm my conclusion.

1. 1 begin with what I regard as the weakest; the change, between Scott's age and ours, in political
order. On this count my proposed frontier would have serious rivals. The change is perhaps less than
that between Antiquity and the Dark Ages. Yet it is very great; and I think it extends to all nations,
those we call democracies as well as dictatorships. If I wished to satirise the present political order I
should borrow for it the name which Punch invented during the first German War: Govertisetnent. This
is a portmanteau word and means "government by advertisement". But my intention is not satiric; I
am trying to be objective. The change is this. In all previous ages that I can think of the principal aim
of rulers, except at rare and short intervals, was to keep their subjects quiet, to forestall or extinguish
widespread excitement and persuade people to attend quietly to their several occupations. And on the
whole their subjects agreed with them. They even prayed (in words that sound curiously
old-fashioned) to be able to live "a peaceable life in all godliness and honesty" and "pass their time in
rest and quietness". But now the organisation of mass excitement seems to be almost the normal organ
ofpolitical power. We live in an age of "appeal if drives", and "campaigns". Our rulers have become
like schoolmasters and are always demanding "keenness". And you notice that I am guilty of a slight
archaism in calling them "rulers". "Leaders" is the modem word. I have suggested elsewhere that this

1 Life of Milton

is a deeply significant change of vocabulary. Our demand upon them has changed no less than theirs
on us. For of a ruler one asks justice, incorruption, diligence, perhaps clemency; of a leader, dash,
initiative, and (I suppose) what people call "magnetism" or "personality".

On the political side, then, this proposed frontier has respectable, but hardly compulsive,
qualifications.

2. In the arts I think it towers above every possible rival. I do not think that any previous age
produced work which was, in its own time, as shatteringly and bewilderingly new as that of the
Cubists, the Dadaists, the Surrealists, and Picasso has been in ours. And I am quite sure that this is true
of the art I love best, that is, of poetry. This question has often been debated with some heat, but the
heat was, I think, occasioned by the suspicion (not always ill-grounded) that those who asserted the
unprecedented novelty of modem poetry intended thereby to discredit it. But nothing is farther from
my purpose than to make any judgement of value, whether favourable or the reverse. And if once we
can eliminate that critical issue and concentrate on the historical fact, then I do not see how anyone
can doubt that modem poetry is not only a greater novelty than any other "new poetry" but new in a
new way, almost in a new dimension. To say that all new poetry was once as difficult as ours is false;
to say that any was is an equivocation. Some earlier poetry was difficult, but not in the same way.
Alexandrian poetry was difficult because it presupposed a learned reader; as you became learned you
found the answers to the puzzles. Skaldic poetry was unintelligible if you did not know the kenningar,
but intelligible if you did. And-this is the real point-all Alexandrian men of letters and all skalds
would have agreed about the answers. I believe the same to be true of the dark conceits in Donne;
there was one correct interpretation of each and Donne could have told it to you. Of course you might
misunderstand what Wordsworth was "up to" in Lyrical Ballads; but everyone understood what he said.
I do not see in any of these the slightest parallel to the state of affairs disclosed by a recent symposium
on Mr. Eliot's Cooking Egg. 9 Here we find seven adults (two of them Cambridge men) whose fives
have been specially devoted to the study of poetry discussing a very short poem which has been before
the world for thirty-odd years; and there is not the slightest agreement among them as to what, in any
sense of the word, it means. I am not in the least concerned to decide whether this state of affairs is a
good thing, or a badthing. 10 1 merely assert that it is a new thing. In the whole history of the West,
from Homer-I might almost say from the Epic ofGilgamesh-there has been no bend or break in the
development of poetry comparable to this. On this score my proposed division has no rival to fear.

3. Thirdly, there is the great religious change which I have had to mention before: the
un-christening. Of course there were lots of sceptics in Jane Austen's time and long before, as there are
lots of Christians now. But the presumption has changed. In her days some kind and degree of
religious belief and practice were the norm: now, though I would gladly believe that both kind and
degree have improved, they are the exception. I have already argued that this change surpasses that
which Europe underwent at its conversion. It is hard to have patience with those Jeremiahs, in Press or
pulpit, who warn us that we are " relapsing into Paganism". It might be rather fun if we were. It would
be pleasant to see some future Prime Minister trying to kill a large and lively milk-white bull in
Westminster Hall. But we shan't. What lurks behind such idle prophecies, if they are anything but
careless language, is the false idea that the historical process allows mere reversal; that Europe can
come out of Christianity "by the same door as in she went" and find herself back where she was. It is
not what happens. A post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman
recovers her virginity by divorce. The post-Christian is cut off from the Christian past and therefore
doubly from the Pagan past.

4. Lastly, I play my trump card. Between Jane Austen and us, but not between her and Shakespeare,
Chaucer, Alfred, Virgil, Homer, or the Pharaohs, comes the birth of the machines. This lifts us at once

Essays in Criticism, III, 3 (July 1953).
1 ° In music we have pieces which demand more talent in the performer than in the composer. Why should there
not come a period when the art of writing poetry stands lower than the art of reading it? Of course rival readings
would then cease to be " right " or " wrong " and become more and less brilliant " performances" .

into a region of change far above all that we have hitherto considered. For this is parallel to the great
changes by which we divide epochs of pre-history. This is on a level with the change from stone to
bronze, or from a pastoral to an agricultural economy. It alters Man's place in nature. The theme has
been celebrated till we are all sick of it, so I will here say nothing about its economic and social
consequences, immeasurable though they are. What concerns us more is its psychological effect. How
has it come about that we use the highly emotive word "stagnation", with all its malodorous and
malarial overtones, for what other ages would have called "permanence"? Why does the word "at once
suggest to us clumsiness, inefficiency, barbarity? When our ancestors talked of the primitive church or
the primitive purity of our constitution they meant nodling of that sort. (The only pejorative sense
which Johnson gives to Primitive in his Dictionary is, significantly, "Formal; affectedly solemn;
Imitating the supposed gravity of old times".) Why does "latest" in advertisements mean "best"? Well,
let us admit that these semantic developments owe something to the nineteenth-century belief in
spontaneous progress which itself owes something either to Darwin's theorem of biological evolution
or to that myth of universal evolutionism which is really so different from it, and earlier. For the two
great imaginative expressions of the myth, as distinct from the theorem-Keats's Hyperion and Wagner's
Ring-are pre-Darwinian. Let us give these their due. But I submit that what has imposed this climate of
opinion so firmly on the human mind is a new archetypal image. It is the image of old machines being
superseded by new and better ones. For in the world of machines the new most often really is better
and the primitive really is the clumsy. And this image, potent in all our minds, reigns almost without
rival in the minds of the uneducated. For to them, after their marriage and the births of their children,
the very milestones of life are technical advances. From the old push-bike to the motor-bike and
thence to the little car; from gramophone to radio and from radio to television; from the range to the
stove; these are the very stages of their pilgrimage. But whether from this cause or from some other,
assuredly that approach to life which has left these footprints on our language is the thing that
separates us most sharply from our ancestors and whose absence would strike us as most alien if we
could return to their world. Conversely, our assumption that everything is provisional and soon to be
superseded, that the attainment of goods we have never yet had, rather than the defence and
conservation of those we have already, is the cardinal business of life, would most shock and bewilder
them if they could visit ours.

I thus claim for my chosen division of periods that on the first count it comes well up to scratch; on
the second and third it arguably surpasses all; and on the fourth it quite clearly surpasses them without
any dispute. I conclude that it really is the greatest change in the history of Western Man.

At any rate, this conviction determines my whole approach to my work from this Chair. I am not
preparing an excuse in advance lest I should hereafter catch myself lecturing either on the Epic of
Gilgcimesh or on the Waverley Novels. The field "Medieval and Renaissance" is already far too wide
for my powers. But you see how to me the appointed area must primarily appear as a specimen of
something far larger, something which had already begun when the Iliad was composed and was still
almost unimpaired when Waterloo was fought. Of course within that immense period there are all
sorts of differences. There are lots of convenient differences between the area I am to deal with and
other areas; there are important differences within the chosen area. And yet despite all this-that whole
thing, from its Greek or pre-Greek beginnings down to the day before yesterday, seen from the vast
distance at which we stand today, reveals a homogeneity that is certainly important and perhaps more
important than its interior diversities. That is why I shall be unable to talk to you about my particular
region without constantly treating things which neither began with the Middle Ages nor ended with
the end of the Renaissance. In that way I shall be forced to present to you a great deal of what can only
be described as Old European, or Old Western, Culture. If one were giving a lecture on Warwickshire
to an audience of Martians (no offence: Martians may be delightful creatures) one might loyally
choose all one's data from that county: but much of what you told them would not really be
Warwickshire lore but "common tellurian".

The prospect of my becoming, in such halting fashion as I can, the spokesman of Old Western
Culture, alarms me. It may alarm you. I will close with one reassurance and one claim.

First, for the reassurance. I do not think you need fear that the study of a dead period, however
prolonged and however sympathetic, need prove an indulgence in nostalgia or an enslavement to the
past. In the individual fife, as the psychologists have taught us, it is not the remembered but the
forgotten past that enslaves us. I think the same is true of society. To study the past does indeed
liberate us from the present, from the idols of our own market-place. But I think it liberates us from
the past too. I think no class of men are less enslaved to the past than historians. The unhistorical are
usually, without knowing it, enslaved to a fairly recent past. Dante read Virgil. Certain other medieval
authors 11 evolved the legend of Virgil as a great magician. It was the more recent past, the whole
quality of mind evolved during a few preceding centuries, which impelled them to do so. Dante was
freer; he also knew more of the past. And you will be no freer by coming to misinterpret Old Western
Culture as quickly and deeply as those medievals misinterpreted Classical Antiquity; or even as the
Romantics misinterpreted the Middle Ages. 12 Such misinterpretation has already begun. To arrest its
growth while arrest is still possible is surely a proper task for a university.

And now for the claim: which sounds arrogant but, I hope, is not really so. I have said that the vast
change which separates you from Old Western has been gradual and is not even now complete. Wide
as the chasm is, those who are native to different sides of it can still meet; are meeting in this room.
This is quite normal at times of great change. The correspondence of Henry More 13 and Descartes is
an amusing example; one would think the two men were writing in different centuries. And here
comes the rub. I myself belong far more to that Old Western order than to yours. I am going to claim
that this, which in one way is a disqualification for my task, is yet in another a qualification. The
disqualification is obvious. You don't want to be lectured on Neanderthal Man by a Neanderthaler, still
less on dinosaurs by a dinosaur. And yet, is that the whole story? If a live dinosaur dragged its slow
length into the laboratory, would we not all look back as we fled? What a chance to know at last how
it really moved and looked and smelled and what noises it made! And if the Neanderthaler could talk,
then, though his lecturing technique might leave much to be desired, should we not almost certainly
learn from him some things about him which the best modem anthropologist could never have told us?
He would tell us without knowing he was telling. One thing I know: I would give a great deal to hear
any ancient Athenian, even a stupid one, talking about Greek tragedy. He would know in his bones so
much that we seek in vain. At any moment some chance phrase might, unknown to him, show us
where modem scholarship had been on the wrong track for years. Ladies and gentlemen, I stand
before you somewhat as that Athenian might stand. I read as a native texts that you must read as
foreigners. You see why I said that the claim was not really arrogant; who can be proud of speaking
fluently his mother tongue or knowing his way about his father's house? It is my settled conviction
that in order to read Old Western literature aright you must suspend most of the responses and unlearn
most of the habits you have acquired in reading modem literature. And because this is the judgement
of a native, I claim that, even if the defence of my conviction is weak, the fact of my conviction is a
historical datum to which you should give full weight. That way, where I fail as a critic, I may yet be
useful as a specimen. I would even dare to go further. Speaking not only for myself but for all other
Old Western men whom you may meet, I would say, use your specimens while you can. There are not
going to be many more dinosaurs.

11 On their identity see Comparetti, Virgilio nel Medio Evo, ed. G. Pasquali (Firenze, 1943), P. xxii. I owe this
reference to Mr. G. C. Hardie

1 2 As my examples show, such misinterpretations may themselves produce results which have imaginative value.
If there had been no Romantic distortion of the Middle Ages, we should have no Eve of St. Agnes. There is room
both for an appreciation of the imagined past and an awareness of its difference from the real past; but if we want
only the former, why come to a university? (The subject deserves much fuller treatment than I can give it here.)

13 A Collection Of several Philosophical Writings (Cambridge, 1662,).